So what's the deal, here?

It's another blog about SF, evidently; but it's no Punkadiddle. I'd say 'I'm sorry to disappoint those who were hoping it might be', but I'm not so vain as to believe there's any lasting general public disappointment involved (I'm quite vain, but not that vain). With the 'diddle, I blogged fairly regularly on SF books and film and the like, for no reason other than that I love SF books and film, and wanted to articulate that love. It was laborious, and did me no good (indeed, many people assured me in comments, it did me active professional harm) but I enjoyed it, up to a point. Nonetheless it just wasn't sustainable, and I can't promise to start doing it again here. I'm afraid I don't have the leisure.

This leads me to ask: how do 'we' use blogs, for values of 'we' including writers, critics, academics and so on? Some of 'us' use blogs to build a fanbase, but my blogs (and I used to run a great many) never managed to Scalzify any particularly sizeable quantity of readers and fans. John Scalzi does many things very well, blogwise; but he has one thing in particular—likeability—that I lack. As to why I lack this quantity, well, that's an interesting question. I'm a pleasant enough fellow, in real life. Not to pick on the man (except that he's a perfect example of what I'm talking about): Scalzi writes a likeable, clever blog in which self-promotion is balanced with alter-promotion, and which wins many readers.  Then he writes likeable, clever books. Readers of his blog know what they are going to get, and accordingly they spend their time go-getting in large numbers. I'm not especially interested in 'likeable' where my novels are concerned, because the aesthetic concerns that fascinate me aren't about that. Likeable is fine, and there are plenty of writers (read: an overwhelming majority of writers) who provide it, if that's what you want.  I have, on some occasions, even essayed it myself. I have no beef with either MOR or AOR. I listen to both kinds of music. It's just not the whole bag.  Likeable skews to bland, and the more I read the more tired I become with bland. There are many, many other things books and stories can do, and those are the things I'm interested in. As I put it in another place, a while back, '...however much I have sacrificed my dignity and sales to the idol of being Johnny Rotten at the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, jeering at the crowd "you ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" We all have our crazy Fitzcarraldo-type dreams, after all.' Though I lack the sales and, therefore the money, and therefore the leisure, to blog at will, what with a mortgage to be covered and kids' shoes to buy (so! many! shoes!), there is nonetheless a part of me that feels happier not pandering, so I guess I'm stuck with that.

So what is the deal, here? Well, blogs have other uses.  My secondary hat is a fine nineteenth-century literature professor topper, and wearing it I am putting the final edits in place to an academic monograph on Walter Savage Landor, and readying an edition of Coleridge's brilliant Biographia Literaria for Edinburgh University Press. A blog is a useful place to park ideas, passages, references and so on; and accordingly a 19th-century lit blog has morphosed (I daresay I should use tumblr instead. What can I say? I'm mired in the past).  Sibilant Fricative serves a parallel, skiffy-related purpose.

I'll be specific, thrice. One: in the immediate future, I am writing an overview piece on Iain Banks' Culture novels for Arc (paying gig, you see), and accordingly I'm re-reading, and in two cases, reading for the first time, all thirteen -- in reverse order, since that seemed to me the way to do it. I'll probably post thoughts on these, here, as I go, by way of helping me get my cyberducks in a row for the actual piece.  The previous post on this very blog, a NYRB-length essay post about Margaret Atwood's science fiction, was similarly utilitarian. I had to teach Oryx and Crake for my day-job at the University of London, and wrote that post to sort-out what I thought about it. That sort of thing.

Two: in the mid-term future, there's something else. The estimable Ian Whates, and more specifically his excellent NewCon Press, are going to publish a collection of my sf-related non-fiction. This is confected of various items, including a fair few of the less disposable Punkadiddle pieces, some of which (it turns out! who knew!) are quite lengthy; and the collection will be available soon.  It will be called Sibilant Fricative, see, and when it comes out I'll use this blog for minimum-efficiency promotion, see.  After that, there's one last thing I want to strip-mine from the old Punkadiddle site (a short book about the ten-best-selling books of all time; I've been, in odd moments, writing up the blog-posts into more finished forms; plus I'm still reading the immensely lengthy Dream of the Red Chamber). When that's done I'll finally be able to wheel on the fiddle-playing cat and jump Punkadiddle over the moon and into oblivion forever.

Three: there are times when I read a book and want to understand why I reacted to it the way I reacted to it. My problem is that I've now reached the stage where I really can't work out what I think unless I write it out; the process of writing is now so intimately connected to my broader processes of cognition and judgment that I can't really do without it. I've got those writerly blue-on-blue eyes now, and without my regular doses of ectriture 'Melange' I'd be in a parlous state.  I don't say this to contradict my first paragraph, for the blue-on-blue eyes don't obviate the need to earn a living; but it does mean that there may be occasional posts here when I'm trying to work something out with respect to a particular novel.

That's the deal, here.

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Update Dec 2014. The seven or so regular readers of this blog will have noticed, assuming they've ever gone to the bother of constellating the above post with the ongoing SibFic activity, that whilst I stayed true to its principles pretty much through 2013, things got busier here in 2014 (in part because I used the blog as a means of getting my thoughts in order with respect to a course on Children's Literature I was teaching) and then much much busier towads the end of this year. This latter was because I'm one of a team judging a literary award, and have gone back to writing (usually brief) blog notices of 2014's releases to get my thoughts in order. This will likely continue into the early portion of 2015, but likely not beyond that. [AR]